Arvixe Hosting Review

Started in 2003, Arvixe remains completely independently owned by founder Arvand Sabetian. To stay competitive in an increasingly saturated market, they work hard for their customers to provide not only exemplary customer support but also an excellent hosting service.

In terms of their Linux hosting (they also have Windows) they have shared, reseller, VPS and dedicated (cloud and bare metal) server options.

Shared and reseller hosting

Arvixe splits their shared hosting plans into two: personal and business plans.

Personal – $4.00 per month

The Personal plan is pretty rock bottom in terms of price compared to other hosting companies if you get a 24 month contract. For a 1 month contract, the price is understandably higher at $7.00 per month. That’s still pretty low though.

The Personal plan has everything you’d need to get started with hosting a website, including lots of tools for developers. It includes:

Unlimited monthly disk space and website transfers

6 domains and unlimited subdomains and domain aliases, plus a free domain name for life (for unlimited domains, you can get Personal Pro for more per month)

CloudFlare CDN

Softaculous, Attracta SEO, and RVSite Builder all installed and ready to go

OS, SQL, and services data is stored on SSD disks for speed (the only company with a better speed policy than this is A2)

Unlimited MySQL and PostgreSQL databases

Your choice of data centre location (US, Europe, or Honk Kong)

The personal accounts also have a range of add-ons, including:

Shared or private Tomcat ($5.00 and $10.00 per month, respectively)

Priority support ($25.00 per month)

SSL Certificate ($30.00 per year)

Business Class is their second option, which offers more or less the same thing except that business class servers have less accounts on them, so each account is afforded more resources and hardware, meaning they run faster. Business Class accounts start at $22.00 per month for 24 months and go up to $30 per month for month by month hosting. Your extra dollars also get you SSL certificate for life and shared Tomcat.

Both business Class and Personal Class Linux hosting plans are compatible with a truly dizzying array of software and programs, including all the major languages, several website development third party programs like Dreamweaver, plus a number of other beneficial programs like Zend Optimizer, ionCube PHP, Flash, Git, and ImageMagick.

Finally, Arvixe puts an absolute premium on server security, and works hard to keep shared servers safe from DDoS attacks, a Firewall to block unopened ports, and a brute force detection engine. This is in addition to nightly security updates.

Arvixe runs their shared hosting servers on CentOS 6.

Reseller hosting

Arvixe also runs a reseller service for $20 for 12 months for their least expensive plan (this goes up to $22 per month as your contract length drops) up to $50 per month for their most Reseller Pro plan.

Their reseller plans include everything above, except that instead of having unlimited disk space and monthly transfers, they have 50GB disk space and 500GB monthly transfers. This increases to 200GB disk space and 2000GB monthly transfers for the Pro plan.

The reason they do this is that their unlimited is actually restricted to reasonable use. And a reseller customer on a Personal plan would most definitely violate reasonable use. So while it looks like you’re paying more for less, you’re actually just paying for what you use.

VPS and dedicated hosting

Arvixe offers VPS and dedicated hosting as well. Their VPS hosting plans come in three tiers, Lite, Normal and Pro. The Lite VPS account is an unmanaged account run on CentOS, and does not includes cPanel or WHM control panel access. It’s a basic, and does not include a number of extras that more advanced plans have, like CloudFlare CDN, MySQL databases, or even PHP/shell access. Basically, it’s a blank canvas for a developer to build as they see fit. The Lite plan starts at $20.00 per month.

The Normal and the Pro have more dedicated disk space, more dedicated memory, and more CPU cores, and go up to $70.00 per month. But the biggest difference is that they’re managed. They come equipped loaded with all of the various benefits of a shared server, with things like MySQL databases and statistics software already installed.

However, while both Normal and Pro are managed solutions, all of three of the VSP plans have root access, and Arvixe specifically mentions that you are free to change you Linux distribution to whatever you see fit. That said, all the plans come with CentOS already on them.

Dedicated hosting

Their cloud hosting options are all fully managed and start at $108 per month and goes up to $149 per month. Each plan comes with CentOS 6.5, which is a modest update over most of the competition, 150GB disk space, 4GB dedicated memory, 8 CPU cores and unlimited data transfers. More money will get you 300GB dedicated space, 8GB RAM, and 16 CPU cores. Each cloud server option also includes cPanel and WHM Control Panel access, Hyper-V technology, SSD RAID 10 drives, and Dual Intel Xeon-Westmere 5670-Hexcore (2.93Ghz).

They also have a bare metal hosting option which covers most of the same stuff, except that you have even more control over what sort of plan you want and how much you need. They tend to be targeted much more towards the enterprise market, with an introductory price of $429.00 per month.

Both the bare metal and cloud dedicated hosting offer root access to the CentOS 6.5 that comes with them.

Linux

Arvixe runs CentOS 6.5 on all their servers, and while the shared servers cannot be changed, all of the other hosting options can be with root access. Furthermore, Arvixe prides themselves on being developer friendly, so it’s clear that they’re more than open to changing your Linux distribution. However, despite offering managed solutions for their dedicated and VPS hosting plans, they do not have any support for a changed OS. That said, they do have a very developer-focused blog that is likely to have tutorials and how-to’s for other development options.

Conclusion

Arvixe is an inexpensive hosting company that, through great management and low operating costs, manages to provide some of the most robust hosting options on the market. Their attitude towards security, development, and their outstanding track record should put them on the shortlist for any dev team looking for a new host.